Ottawa considering 'combination of approaches' to 20% military pay hike

National Post

4 hours ago

OTTAWA — Defence Minister David McGuinty's office says it's considering a 'combination of approaches' to boosting pay for armed service members, including introducing retention bonuses for 'stress trades.'
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'This investment represents an almost 20 per cent increase to the overall CAF compensation envelope,' McGuinty's spokesperson Laurent de Casanove said in an email statement to The Canadian Press.
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'The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces are actively working on how best to implement this investment, looking at options that include a combination of approaches such as retention bonuses for stress trades, increased starting salaries for junior members, and a broad-based salary increase.'
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While McGuinty's recent public commitment to grant the Canadian Armed Forces a '20 per cent pay increase' won praise within the defence community, it has also led to confusion — and some experts are saying they want to read the fine print.
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Military pay scales are complicated and are based on rank, profession, deployment and other conditions. There are many ways to roll out a boost in compensation.
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Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said she thinks this will not amount to an across-the-board pay hike.
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'What is clear to me from this statement is that they are looking at all the options,' she said. 'We're still in that big question about what it looks like because a pay raise versus specialty pay versus an adaptation of the compensation package overall — not in salary — are not the same thing.'
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She said the way the pay pledge was communicated initially was 'risky' since the details were not readily available, and that has led to confusion among military members and expectations of a blanket pay hike.
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Gary Walbourne, former ombudsman for the Department of National Defence, called McGuinty's promise 'vague at best.'
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'There's nothing clear in this message,' he said. 'A 20 per cent increase overall to CAF compensation envelope, what does that mean? Is it coming in benefits? … Is it going be on a cyclical basis? What's the percentage increase? Is it based on seniority, rank, merit?'
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The former watchdog for military personnel said it sounds like the Liberal government wants to implement a pay boost quickly, but 'the mechanisms that they apply to it is going to complicate it and once the bureaucrats get their hands on it, well, I can see a slowdown coming.'
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If CAF members don't see a 20 per cent pay bump after the minister's announcement, he said, it will be 'deja vu all over again' for military personnel who have been let down in the past by lofty promises followed by implementation that 'sucks big time.'